so love this vessel while you’re aboard

I want to stand right in the center of this video for a long while.

Dum vivimus vivamus.

Scotland’s Admiral Fallow first charmed me two years ago with this singalong cover (which I still listen to on a very regular basis), and they have a wonderful new record out called Tree Bursts In Snow (Nettwerk Records).

Thanks to reader Laurie for bringing this video into my morning.

watch the circles take you home

I have two musical items that I would like to share with you tonight related to Admiral Fallow, a sextet from Glasgow that I’ve just been introduced to. This band couples winsomely intelligent, sharply evocative lyrics with ambling orchestral builds — starring both clarinets and foot-stomping in equal measure.

There is an immediately warm similarity to countrymates Frightened Rabbit, and in fact the two will be sharing the stage on several dates this spring. The Admiral Fallow debut album Boots Met My Face will be re-released in March 2011. It’s spun together both fine and real.

Squealing Pigs – Admiral Fallow

You’ll probably be singing along with that song after two or three listens, like I was. You can stream the whole album on Bandcamp; I am particularly captivated by their songs “Subbuteo,” and “Taste The Coast,” — even though the latter may have been written about a cold northern sea five thousand miles from my home near the coast of California, I feel the same way they do about the salty air. The clever simile-lover and poetry-reader in me also stopped short over the song “Dead Against Smoking,” in which a woman with skin the color of a violet golden sky, and inspires this striking chorus:

You’re like gasoline.
You’re like the willow tree.
You’re like a split screen.
But you’re the green in me.

I’m a sucker.

Second item of note: Admiral Fallow frontman Louis Abbott (below in the stripes) recently took part in this rad mini-movement in Glasgow where the city’s finest folk musicians do “wee jaunts,” playing a number of short shows en masse in completely unlikely places, like restrooms, subways, and stairwells. This made me laugh in utter delight; they sound so joyous covering Bon Iver, with their voices reverberating all around them.

I’m on my seventh eighteenth time watching it.

For Emma (Bon Iver) – Admiral Fallow & Blochestra